


We All Hate Home

by andthebluestblue, Shayvaalski



Series: The Kids Are Alright [18]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Badbrains, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gen, Kid Fic, M/M, Origin Story, Parent-Child Relationship, Parenthood, Parentlock, Post-Reichenbach, Pregnancy, Sebastian Moran and Jim Moriarty are Parents, Tamil Moran, Trans Character, Trans Female Character, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-02
Updated: 2017-02-02
Packaged: 2018-09-21 12:09:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 14,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9548435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andthebluestblue/pseuds/andthebluestblue, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shayvaalski/pseuds/Shayvaalski
Summary: "...Such a deliberate step backwardsTo create an object:Books; china; a lifeReprehensibly perfect."—Seventeen stories about how Jim Moriarty and Sebastian Moran get their daughter, in the days after Reichenbach. All of them are true.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic contains allusion to transmasculine characters carrying children, and transfeminine ones assisting in making them. If this is something that bothers you, you should skip 6, 12, and 15!

Here is the way it goes for Siobhan: there is nothing for her and the nothing tastes of smoke.


	2. Chapter 2

Once upon a time, there was a man who was a spider. Or a fox. Or a wolf in sheep’s clothes. Or your mum, who held your true name in eyes like deep black water, and who found you as a babe, little girl lost in woods too thick to run through; who let you be raised among beasts that looked like men, cosseted, alone but not alone; not when you could look at your mother like a mirror,  _ fairest one of all.  _

Take your pick, my darling, best beloved, my fire under smoke. 


	3. Chapter 3

There are two girls and a boy to start, a year between each one. Their last name is their father’s and there is a reason for this; they live quietly in Belfast and all go to the same school. The oldest one is nine. The youngest is a girl. They have two parents. Their parents love them all, but worry. (There is a reason for this, too.) The only boy is Padraig. The eldest is Cathleen. The third—and last—is called Siobhán.

 

—

 

Even before they get to Kilternan, he knows about her. Jim has known about his nieces and nephew for some years, by the time they have to pick up and move, though he imagines his sister would choose to believe she has made herself and her children impossible to find. He doesn’t care about them. Or her. He just likes to  _ know _ . He knows that the rest of their family has changed their names, left the country, denied association; knows that Moira is the last holdout, more or less. There are second cousins Jim has never met. They do not matter. Until they move to Kilternan, none of them matter. They don’t even cross his mind. 

 

—

 

And once they are  _ in _ Kilternan, his niece—no. His daughter, and how could Siobhán (Siobhan;  _ see-oh-bahn; _ unexpected and perfect) be anything but his daughter? is standing black-haired on his doorstep, her pupils blown and her clothes smelling of smoke; they are one beast in two skins. As inevitable as the ground, rushing up towards James. 

 

—

 

“Come in,” he says, to the girl who wears his wrists in boyhood. “Come in, pet. And welcome home.” 


	4. Chapter 4

Enough of the professional web Jim has spent the past five years constructing is torn to shreds to give a good impression that he himself has been ripped out of it, but enough of his personal one is left to send shivers to him, six days after Sebastian finds a job. The email is blank, no subject, no body text; but attached to it is a copy of a CAMHS referral form for a girl of seven, surname B—, first initial S., written at four thirty-two on a Wednesday afternoon and recommending priority assessment at Beechcroft. There is a handwritten note at the bottom, which reads  _ M: In-patient suggested. Suspect action will be taken within next fortnight, no sooner. More pressing issues. See next. _

Jim flips to the email that had arrived as he read the first. Surname B—, first initial P., intake form for a boy of eight with significant third-degree burns. The note here, in the same hand, reads:  _ Matches _ . 

He takes down the address of Father’s Name and Mother’s Name, and the hospital addresses, just in case, before deleting the email. Then he considers. In the next room Sebastian is putting together a bookcase, cursing softly and contentedly; Jim can just see him if he leans back in his chair. 

He does not move, except to tap his fingers against the desk. There had been three of them, too, inverted; Jimmy and James and Moira, elder brothers and baby sister, a Moriarty trinity in the Catholic countryside of Northern Ireland. He wonders, idly, what the little girl’s justification had been, what hot streak of trembling, incandescent,  _ brilliant  _ rage had guided her, giving her direction. He can’t remember his own, except that he had been, fascinatingly, a good deal older. 

Jim has always wondered what he would do with a prodigy. To see what he could have been, given room, given his head, given world enough and time. 

Jim fingers the nearly invisible scar on his upper lip, familiar as his own voice and nearly as old. As old as my teeth and a little older than my tongue. There is, also, that; and times may be different now but not so very different—third degree burns indeed. He has to move quickly. There will, very shortly, be hell to pay. 

In the end Jim arranges to borrow a car from their neighbors, who are glad for the hundred quid he pushes on them for the use of it. He makes sure, also, to fill the tank, though he does not wash it; Sebastian’s powers of observation are nowhere near his own but they are also nothing sneer at, and the O’Doyles have neither the time nor inclination to wash their car. And Sebastian will not be accompanying him; he decides this almost at once. Seven is so young. Jim can hardly remember it, but he knows what let him thrive was an absence of observation and Siobhán, he thinks, is likely to be heavily observed. He does not need Sebastian. Not for this. Later, certainly. He has seen Moran with children, knows he has sisters whose offspring he would like to see. Who perhaps they will see, if she needs more company than Kilternan can provide. It will be easy, once they have her in the house. Fatherhood will come easy, for Sebastian. 

Jim is most of the way to Belfast by noon. It’s a weekday but he is betting this will not matter, not with a son in the hospital and a daughter without mercy. If he were Moira (he is not Moira, Moira is not him, and neither of them are James with his body sprawled out at the base of a tree), he would be home with the little girl, entirely aware of what she could do but unable to be anywhere else in anything like good conscience. 

Which is where he finds her, of course. 

“Don’t make a fuss,” he tells her, pleasantly, when she opens the door and he catches the edge of it to keep it open. It’s a nice little semidetached house, just right for a young family. The girls must share a room. Must have previously shared a room, anyway. “Just ask me in, Moira darling. Don’t you look well.”

There is a very long silence. Jim had been lying; Moira does not look well. Her hair is dyed a shade of blond he does not like, and she has been crying, but the set of her mouth when she understands who she is seeing is charmingly, perfectly familiar. 

“I see you can’t be trusted with children,” he says, sweetly, and for the space of a breath he think she will attempt an act of violence upon him with the cordless phone in her hand. Jim hopes she will. It will add savor, let him skip the pretenses of civility. 

Instead, Moira steps back. Her face is set too, and once he is in she turns her on back on him, walks away without looking, which he is impressed with; but then she has turned her back on him before. Jim follows, of course, through the hall and up the stairs, taking his time. There are photographs on the walls, none more than ten years old (he does not see their parents anywhere; he sees no memorial black for dear departed James) and children’s drawings, and art up high enough it won’t be knocked askew. The floor is wood. The rugs are sturdy. At the top of the stairs he counts and, yes, there are three bedrooms, two with blank doors and one with a spaceship stuck to it with tape. 

One of the blank doors is locked, from the outside; and the lock is new. 

“You,” Moira says, flatly, with her arms crossed, “might’ve had the decency to stay dead, Jimmy.”

“Like James?” he asks, all innocence, and shows her his teeth. Moira turns on her heel, unlocks the door with a motion as violent as Jim at his worst, and strides into the room. Jim eels after her. 

He is not fast enough to stop the woman from grabbing the black-haired girl roughly by the arm and dragging her upright. She is tiny. She is  _ so _ tiny, all enraged dark eyes and motion unrestrained, and she fights Moira’s grip like a wildcat. 

“Put her down.” 

Jim says it flatter than he intends, with the hoarse back-of-throat lilt he uses when he’s working. He doesn’t plan that either. Doesn’t expect the way it makes the little girl go all still, then struggle even harder. 

“Let. Her go, Moira.”

In another moment Jim will stop trying to be polite, and he will get the two of them out of this situation, he can do that much even without Sebastian’s covering fire. She’s small enough that she’ll barely even be a burden—but Moira drops her. 

“I might have known this had you all over it,” she says, disgust plain in her voice. The girl is back against a wall, tucked into the corner, eyes huge and not entirely there, pupils blown in a way that makes Jim twitch. “She’s never mine.”

“Get out,” Jim says, almost absently. He doesn’t look to see if she obeys; instead he crouches down at a little distance, head tipped to one side, lashes low, one hand braced lightly against the floor and the other dangling off his bent knee. 

“Pet,” he says, softly. She is all pent-up and electric energy, sparking off her like a dry rug in winter but stronger. Jim hears Moira take a step closer; the girl snarls, her pupils drinking the light. Jim whirls, the same snarl on his mouth. 

“I am  _ fixing this for you _ ,” he hisses, so soft it barely even reaches his ears. “I am making this  _ vanish  _ out of the  _ goodness of my heart _ . Get out of my way.”

And he turns back to Siobhán. One of her hands is clenching at the bottom of the bed, and Jim is interested to see that the narrow metal bars of the little-girl princess frame are bending under the pressure. Her head is tilted back, mouth a open as she pants. 

“Pet,” Jim says again, and then, intuitive, “Tell me your name.”

Silence like the silence after a bell. Then: three syllables like dropped pins. “Siobhan.”

“It’s pronounced—”

Jim roars, without ever taking his eyes off the girl; Moira catches her breath in something like a sob and the door slams so hard it shakes the wall. Neither of them move. He breathes in, soft. 

“Siobhan,” he says, gently, so gently, and offers her a hand. She looks at it, all doubt and tangled hair, and then at him, her head a little to one side, examining his face, his wrist, the way he holds his body. Something must make sense to her; something he does or does not do, because she makes a small noise like  _ Yes _ and reaches out. Jim folds his fingers around hers, then in one graceful fluid rush of motion he picks her up and stands. She is  _ his.  _ They both know it, she is his daughter and he is her—

Jim blinks. Blinks again. Laughs, high, and says, answering the question her unsteady unchildlike gaze is asking him, “I’m your mum, pet. And it’s going to be just  _ fine.” _

Her fingers curl into his collar as Jim shoulders open the door. At the bottom of the stairs Moira is standing frozen, the phone still in her hand, staring up at them. He hefts Siobhan. So light. Too light. Sebastian will be  _ spitting  _ mad. 

“As of this morning and as far as the system knows,” he says, with some savagery but while keeping his voice light, “your youngest has been permanently committed. In a year or so there will be an unfortunate incident, no one’s  _ fault,  _ of course, these things happen, it was her heart, you see.” He advances down the stairs and his sister retreats. “Your hospital bills are paid. If I were you, Moira  _ darling _ , I’d jump the gun and give out that she’s died. The NHS will catch up soon enough.”

Jim brushes past her, just touching. He hears her take a shuddery breath, and as he steps outside she says to his back, “I have two children. A boy and a girl.”

“That’s the spirit,” Jim says, brightly, and slams the door behind them. 


	5. Chapter 5

“ _ Well _ , Jimmy.”

“Problem?”

“Not exactly, no. This is a bit of a long shot, but you don’t…you don’t have some sort of intersex condition that you haven’t mentioned? Or—I don’t know. Something. Some relevant organs you never brought up?” 

“You’ve got my file.”

“So I do.”

_ “And?” _

“And it’s complete, I know, you told me.”

“Not like you to be forgetful. So?”

“So.”

“Don’t be  _ coy, _ Caro.”

“Prenatal vitamins, I suppose. Try to remember to take them, will you?”

 

—

 

“You know I’m not an ob-gyn.”

“Oh, I don’t mind if you don’t. It’s not like the second half is relevant, is it?”

“Don’t get cute. You should have some kind of specialist, though I’m damned if I know what kind. Genetic, maybe.”

“I want you.”

“Jimmy—”

“You’re my doctor. End of story. Do your  _ job,  _ Caroline.”

 

—

 

“So. What are you going to do with her now you’ve got her? Did you bother with a name?”

“Siobhán. Probably. I’ve people I can trust, until the time’s right. Give it here, will you?” 

“Her, Jimmy.”

“It’s Jim, now.”

 


	6. Chapter 6

There is only the one child. More would, perhaps, have been a more effective guarantee; after all, Jim’s sister bears almost no resemblance to him-as-he-is, and James had not lived long enough to tell. There had been three of them; Jamie and James and Moira, middle brother and his flanking sisters passing as twins, a Moriarty trinity in the Catholic countryside of Northern Ireland. Blood guarantees nothing, in the end; but Jim takes the chance. He must. 

He bears it well, he thinks. It helps that the situation is a temporary one, as everything to do with gender is, and coincides with a period of time that there is little to be done in person, where Jim rarely leaves his flat past the day he begins to show; he sees Caroline, who he thinks disapproves, every fortnight. She is not an ob-gyn, she reminds him regularly, right up until the day he leaves his chest unbound and checks himself into hospital under a false name to have what turns out to be a little girl. Probably, anyway; but they will find out later, won’t they? 

A year later you would not know to look at him, and six years after that they move to Kilternan. 

Jim thinks rather less of the Northern-Irish woman he finds to raise his daughter after the panicked messages appear on his phone shortly after what he is beginning to think of as the Reichenbach Affair; he had intended to wait a little longer, until Siobhán—he names her Siobhán, after nobody he knows—was ten or perhaps twelve. Old enough to step easily into the family business, old enough that she will be the next best thing to another adult; but instead she is seven and Jim half-coaxes and half-bullies their next-door neighbors into lending him their car and drives to Belfast in a blind rage. She is  _ his.  _ Had Jim been properly dead, certain chains of events would have set themselves in motion; this woman knows that, and the chains lie undisturbed, and yet here they are, two days from Siobhán, from his  _ daughter _ , ending in state-sponsored care. 

And state-sponsored care in the UK, he knows, will end with Mycroft Holmes. 

 

—

 

He whips over the border at Killeen, rockets through Bessbrook and Dromore and Lisburn in a white-hot fury, leaves tire marks in front of the flat where the woman he has been paying for seven years lives; he does not bother to lock the car or ring the bell. Instead he drops down in front of the door, wastes fifteen seconds on the lock—and then hisses in a breath along with another surge of rage, then wraps his jacket around his fist, and breaks a window. It hurts but the hurt is a blur and he grapples for the knob and slams the door open so hard it dents the wall. The house reeks of struck matches, and somebody is screaming. 

When he hits the kitchen, pupils blown, it takes everything he has not to commit violence; the red-haired woman is standing, one hand raised, the other gripping the upper arm of a child who is very small and very thin and very,  _ very _ like Jim at her age, whose mouth is shut in a tight line and whose eyes indicate she is not entirely behind them. She is not the one screaming. Jim is fairly sure it would take more than Bridget could manage, to make her scream. 

“Drop her,” Jim gasps out. The little tableau freezes. He draws another breath. “Drop her  _ now.”  _ This time it comes out flat, with the curious hoarse back-of-throat lilt he uses when he’s working. The little girl’s gaze snaps to him.

The instant Bridget’s grip loosens Siobhán snatches her arm away and bolts; not out of the room, but to a corner where it will be hard to get at her, placing her back carefully against the wall. Jim is charmed, in the midst of his anger, to see that she’s made the best of her limited resources and grabbed a heavy wooden spoon. Driven into a stomach or slammed against a wrist, that will  _ hurt. _ Good girl.

“M,” Bridget says, and straightens up. “I thought you were—”

“If I had died,” he says, light and cruel, “you would have heard before I even hit the ground.”

“You never said.”

“Wrong.” He approaches, and she steps back. “The first iteration of the contract stated clearly the channels through which you would be informed and named the party she would go to in the event of my untimely demise, Ms. Donahue. The second iteration updated both. You cannot plead ignorance, or anything but the intent to blackmail.” Jim rocks forward again. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Siobhán tracking him, hunger in the tilt of her head.

“M, I swear, I was just trying to reach you, get you to respond if you were—”

“And here I am.” He bares his teeth at her, not a smile. “Stop making excuses, Donahue. You clearly can’t be trusted with children.” 

And he turns away from her, towards the little girl still crowded into the corner. Jim is proud of her; she has never once taken her eyes off of him. Whether he means her harm or no—and he does not—Jim is the threat in the room, and his location is paramount. 

“Pet,” he says, and crouches, looking at her steadily, meeting her gaze. “Do you know me?”

She nods; and there is something horrible in her face, a pent-up and trembling relief, that he recognizes somewhere bone-deep.

“Mum,” Siobhán says, and Jim goes very still. She tips her head at him, tense again, and her lower jaw drops a little as she pants. Her hair is a wild tangle and her wrists are Jim’s wrists in girlhood—

“Close enough,” he says, and holds out both hands. The wooden spoon hits the floor and she is in his arms; Jim holds her for a moment, not as comfort but as confirmation, then gets to his feet, vibrating with rage. Siobhán stays down, tucked behind his legs, close as a shadow or the cold in winter. 

“How dare you,” he says, conversational. 

“Siobhán’s a child,” says Bridget, and Jim cannot  _ believe _ she is still arguing with him. “She wouldn’t understand, M.”

“Siobhan.” The three syllables, dropped-pin distinct, come from just behind him; and Jim smiles. Of course. 

“I am going to make all of this go away,” he drawls, still pleasant. “Fix it up proper for you.” Jim bends, picks up his daughter, who grips his collar with small, strong fingers. She is so light. Once Sebastian gets over his shock, he will be furious, and that will erase all kinds of inconvenient questions from his mind. 

“Best you give out that she’s died,” he adds. “Children die so easily, after all.”

Fifteen minutes later they are in the car, with nothing but the clothes on her back and two artfully forged passports, which they show at the border to a guard who smiles and welcomes them home. They do not talk, or need to talk, except once, half an hour from Kilternan, when Jim says to the road ahead, “Mum is as good as anything else, pet.”

And then, as her dark familiar eyes show something he recognizes as pleasure, he adds like a shared secret, “After all, Siobhan, a girl needs a feminine influence. Don’t you agree?”


	7. Chapter 7

“Jim, darling,” Irene says on the phone, “if you and your man have settled in, I think it’s just about time.”

“Surely not.”

“Jim.” There is a warning, mild but sincere, in the Woman’s voice. 

“I’m not doubting your maternal instincts, Irene,” he says, and stands, wandering over to the window. Sebastian is outside doing something technical to the garden. “But she’s a little young, surely.”

“She’ll be eight in February.”

“Eight? Are you  _ entirely _ certain?”

“A mother knows, Jim. So to speak.”

There’s a brief, delicate pause. 

“And is she—?”

“She’s got you written all over her, if that’s what you’re asking. If I thought we could manage Siobhan much longer on our own I would have waited, but we can’t. How’s the old country, anyway?”

“Very green. Siobhan?”

“She’s quite clear on that, yes. Jim, I worry about her—I really do think it’s time.”

“What did she do, pet?”

It’s Irene’s turn to be silent for a while. 

“Nothing that can’t be mended or won’t heal,” she says, carefully. “I’m sending you Kate’s A&E bill. It was quite a minor burn, all things considered, and she  _ did  _ help clean up after. She’s a good girl, in her way, but it’s time, Jim.”

“Seb’ll be out of the house a week from Monday,” says Jim, and he is suddenly on fire with needing to know her, this small wild echo of himself. There had been three of them a hundred years ago, Jimmy and James and Moira. “I’ll pay for the flights.”

“Aren’t you sweet.”

“I do  _ try _ , darling. All love to Kate.”

 

—

 

In Dublin eight days later he is lounging against a borrowed car in his best suit when Irene appears, a child on her hip; they are both elegant, and he can see The Woman in the girl, but more than Irene he can see himself, dark and delicate.

“You look well, James,” she says, and kisses him on the cheek. 

“You never look anything but.” He returns the gesture, then steps back again. “Your flight back leaves in ninety minutes, first class.”

“So thoughtful.” She hefts the girl, who has never once taken her eyes off him. “This is Jim, angel. Last name?” 

“Moran.” He looks at her steadily, meeting her gaze. “But your mum’s a Moriarty, Siobhan, and so are you.” 

“My mum?” It’s the first time he’s heard her voice, and it’s an accent he doesn’t expect, the Northern Irish of his boyhood, an accent she must have  _ learned, _ and Irene laughs at the way he blinks.

“Me.” Jim ignores her and flashes Siobhan a smile, savage and swift, and a kind of tension goes out of her small body. “Best we get going, darling girl.”

“Best you do,” Irene says, softly, as the child reaches for the hands Jim holds out to her. 

“Here.” Jim settles Siobhan onto his own hip and Irene is struck by them, by the same beast in two skins; and she does not regret giving up her daughter, because Siobhan is not her daughter. Not really. Jim presses neatly folded notes into her pocket and a kiss to her cheek, then steps away. “Give your wife my best.”

“Give your husband mine.”

He laughs, and turns away, Siobhan’s hands curled into his collar; and Irene, with relief, lets motherhood slide off her body like a dress from shoulders. 

Written all over her, indeed. 

 


	8. Chapter 8

“ _ Well _ , Seb. When a mum beats a dad until he begs and then they  _ fuck _ , a very special thing happens.” His voice is a lilt. “After both of them come suitably hard and are suitably satisfied, a little  _ message _ goes out with the pertinent details regarding their situation—regarding their specialities. Their particular... talents, darling, shall we say? And then a  _ very _ talented and observant stork goes hunting for the perfect little bundle of joy, just as clever and tough as you might like, and he picks her up from wherever she’s been hiding.”

Jim flashes a grin, razor edged, breathes in. He can smell the matches Siobhan had used to light the grill, lit and then blown out. 

“And then the mum beats the dad again, just for good measure. Or the dad beats the mum. Either way. And then they fuck, and then they pull off just the  _ cleverest _ thing imaginable over the biggest git in Britain.” Sebastian’s mouth tilts up at one side and Jim knows he’s won. Knows he never had a chance of losing. “And when the mum and dad have settled down in a nice little safehouse the stork comes back with their daughter, shouldn’t your parents have  _ given _ you this talk, Sebby?”

“You have no idea how much I wish they had,” says Sebastian. 

 


	9. Chapter 9

When Jim finally meets the girl in person he is reminded, forcibly, of Sebastian’s tastes. He has never met her mother, but then, he did not have to; he can see it in the quick turn of her head, the darkness yawning behind her eyes, the slenderness of her wrists as tense as his wrists in boyhood. He already knew her mother was white, that she was either Northern Irish or had lived in Northern Ireland long enough to make no difference, that she was small and slim; he knew also that the color of her hair and eyes were recessive and overwhelmed by the more dominant Tamil genetics Sebastian carries, if not expresses; he knew she outranked Sebastian, and that while he was dismissed the service, she was not. 

Jim assumes the two were unrelated; he has seen Sebastian’s dishonorable discharge, and it has nothing to do with this particular kind of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. He knew, too, the exact moment that she was wounded and then killed in action, and made sure the little girl entered the system unremarked, no next of kin; the timing was bad, with the Holmes project just lifting its head, to take her yet; and anyway she was very young. 

Jim’s knowledge of Sebastian Moran—of his conquests and conflicts, his family and his friends, his movements and his needs—is more comprehensive than Sebastian’s knowledge of himself, so Jim has been aware of Siobhán almost since he has been aware of Moran. 

They have been in Kilternan for two weeks when a strand of the personal web Jim keeps active even as he rips artful holes in the professional one vibrates, the tiniest bit; he hesitates over it for some time, nearly a day, until he sees on the news a fire at a group home in a Northern Irish suburb, no one hurt, but the blame focusing on a small girl with a dead mother; and his web hums again. When he sees her picture on the screen he knows it, instantly, intimately; knows the shape of the her mouth, the arch of her nose, the fall and texture of her hair. Knows it even before his memory supplies Siobhán’s last school picture or the newscaster her name. 

The bloodline is Sebastian’s. But the face Jim sees is his. 

 

—

 

It takes so embarrassingly little to get ahold of her that Jim is almost—but not quite—dangerously bored even before he starts. Caseworker credentials are easy to fake, so he fakes them; the drive is easy to make so he makes it. Belfast is only an hour or two away, after all, and they have the kind of neighbors, who, bless, will lend a cup of sugar or a car or their first-born child at a moment’s notice. He wonders, as he slams the door, if Sebastian did this on purpose, but that suggests a degree of forward-thinking Sebastian does not usually display. The man lives in the moment, and Jim relies on that. Will rely on that. Once Sebastian gets over his shock, he will be entirely focused on how to raise this sort of child, and that will erase all kinds of inconvenient questions from his mind. 

In Belfast, at the foster home in which she has been placed—very clean, very modern—he sits in the car for perhaps ten minutes, humming quietly to himself, off-key and preparatory, before he creases his documentation neatly, taps it against the steering wheel, and swings his feet to the pavement. He does not expect to need the birth certificate or her passport, carefully worn as if she’s used it for years, any more than he needed his on the way up. But it never hurts to be sure. 

He is wearing slacks and a sweater that does not fit quite right, and comfortable shoes, his coat slung over his arm, carrying a folder in one hand. He looks like every caseworker he has ever kept his distance from, mild and thoughtful behind the eyes. Jim is not expected, but he thinks he will be welcome; they cannot of course prosecute an eight year old, so there is nothing to be done with Siobhán except keep her, bounce her to whatever house they think can handle the trapped-animal twist of her neck—

The door opens. 

“Mz. Donahue,” Jim says, with his most sincere smile and the accent of his boyhood, “Jay Murphy. Social worker from the NSPCC. I’m here about—” he steals a glance at the folder “— Siobhán. I’m so sorry we didn’t call ahead, but as you know this has been a bit of an unusual situation and we’re doing the best we can to keep up.”

“Lord, yes.” She smiles back. Bridget Donahue, fifty-nine, has been a foster parent for nearly twenty years, experienced, calm; the best option for a damaged child. “She’s doing well, but I’m that glad I don’t have any other kids staying. Please, come in. Cuppa?”

“Thank you, love, but I’m on a schedule today. We’ve got a little bit of a drive ahead of us.” He taps the file thoughtfully against his palm as he steps inside. “But it should be a good placement. Up north. Plenty of experience with children with... special needs.” Another smile, a  _ you know what I mean _ smile. “Before we see her, Mz. Donahue—how’s she been?”

“Oh, just fine! Better than I expected, given the circumstances. Hardly any argument.” Bridget frowns thoughtfully as she tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “Quiet little thing, really. Still, I’m pleased she’s going to someone with a bit more experience. Anything I need to sign?”

“When isn’t there?” Jim says it with the weary chuckle of a career social worker, and lays out the forms for her. They’re real forms, even, the legal forms that release the little girl from Bridget Donahue’s care into Jay Murphy’s, because Bridget Donahue knows the system inside and out, but they will not be filed. “Here. Here, and here. There, and I’ll initial—here. Lovely.”

As Bridget scribbles her name Jim can, suddenly, feel eyes on him, but he does not turn until the papers are gathered back together in his folder. Until Bridget Donahue turns and catches sight of the little girl and says, “Siobhán, love, this is Mr. Murphy.”

For a moment he thinks that the way she goes tense all over is because she is worried, because she has learned to track the pattern of movement that the foster system produces for difficult cases, the look of an adult come to whisk her away with no warning, and then Jim watches her drop her chin down and a little to the left, and with a shock like his brother hitting the ground (there had been three of them once, Jimmy and James and Moira) he recognizes anger. Anger like his own but cold. 

She says nothing. Bridget shoots him an apologetic smile. Jim—incandescent—waves her off cheerfully, and crouches down to eye level. Siobhán is trembling, turned inward, mastering whatever huge and horrifying thing is living inside her chest, with no guidance, with no parent to steer her, and now, with the little girl right in front of him, Jim knows for sure that her mother was as unstable and brilliant as he himself can be. Sebastian has a type. More than a type. 

“Here now, lass,” he says, and something—the way he says it or the way he moves, he’s not sure—makes her look up. Her pupils are huge, blown with some emotion dark and nonspecific and so familiar it makes him twitch, and her gaze flicks sideways and then back. She is tiny. She is  _ so _ tiny. 

And because Bridget Donahue cannot see his face, Jim lets the mild-eyed therapist slip from him like a dress from shoulders and meets her returning gaze full-on and steady. Lets himself be seen, as he had seen her. 

Relief washes over Siobhán like a wave, ebb and flow, the tension of years releasing from her small body, even though he is still a stranger to her. He flashes a white-hot savage grin and is rewarded with a single slow blink, catlike; but it’s enough for him. He straightens up, pulling Jay Murphy back on, turns to Bridget, smiles, keeps his voice low. 

“Am I right to think she’s the kind who’s always packed?” he says. The woman sighs. 

“One of those, yes. Siobhán, love, run and fetch your suitcase.”

Again that tiny jerk downwards of the chin before she turns on her heel and vanishes, and Jim wonders. They make small talk for several minutes, the kind of thing that sets Jim’s teeth on edge even on a good day, and so he links the fingers of one hand around the wrist of the other behind his back. Dredges up gossip from Saint Bart’s, transposes it onto social work, discusses the weather, and then Siobhán reappears, fingers clutched around the strap of a worn blue bag. 

“Right,” Jim says, businesslike but kind. “Come along, lass, best we be going. Say goodbye to Mz. Donahue now.”

Siobhán does as she’s told. It makes Jim furious, the way she steps in to be hugged; it is obvious to anyone with eyes how little she wants to be touched, how difficult it is for her; but Bridget Donahue almost certainly has been chalking it up to that she is a child with Damage, a child in pain, an emotionally disturbed little girl with smoke in her black, black hair. 

“Come along,” he says again when it’s over, and offers her a hand, because that’s what a caseworker does with a child they are working with; they keep them safe.  

Her grip is very tight, all the way to the car. 

 

—

 

“Well, pet,” he says, twenty kilometers down the road. She is silent in the backseat, staring out the window. “Some things we should chat about.”

Her eyes meet his in the rearview, then slide away. 

“Siobhán.”

This time she actually makes a noise like a snarl, and clenches her fingers around the straps of her bag again, face going flat and unreadable—Jim wants to turn around and look at her, really look, and he also wants to get as far away from Belfast as possible. But he cannot let that noise stand. 

“Tell me,” he says, and her gaze jerks back to him. “Tell me, pet, and you’ll get told too.”

“Siobhan.” Three syllables, dropped-pin distinct, and yes. Yes, that makes sense. 

“Siobhan,” he affirms; the girl’s body goes loose again, jaw a little dropped to pant. Her head tips back against the seat, though she keeps watching him from beneath her lashes. “You’re out of the system as of  _ now _ . We’ll see to you. Get you off anything they’ve had you taking. Never again _ ,  _ Siobhan.” He taps the folder next to him.

“We?”

“Me and your daddy.” He grins, feral. “I’ll be mum, of course, and we’ll raise you up proper.” 

There’s a long pause. 

“Why.”

It’s not even a question, but Jim answers it like one. 

“You’re a Moriarty,” he says, simple. “You knew me same way I knew you. You’ll be a Moran with us, of course, after Sebastian, but there’s no arguing with what’s in the blood.” He pauses, watching her in flickers between watching the road. “Climb up here, pet. Sit with me.”

After a few seconds she scrambles up over the armrest. She moves like he does, lightening-quick and boneless and  _ wrong,  _ and Jim has never been so sure of any decision he’s made in all his life. She is their daughter. She is Jim incarnate and she has Seb’s nose. 

He reaches over once she’s settled, rests a hand against her hair. 


	10. Chapter 10

When he comes back out to the car she is sitting in it. This is three years before he dies, and he is in Northern Ireland, in the rough part of Belfast, meeting with a group of his people there on his way back from England, traveling under an assumed name. Jim was born in the countryside, and he was born Catholic and first of three, and he disdains it a little more each time he has to return. 

(Three: Jimmy. James. Moira. A trinity, unsanctified and shattered.) 

“Out you come, pet.” Jim would not call himself a cruel man, and he lifts the little girl—black-haired, big-eyed, too thin, but what poor child from, he assumes, a family on the wrong side of Her Majesty’s government wouldn’t be—down to the pavement. “Run along now.”

She does not run along. Man and girl regard each other for a moment, him amused, her still like dead things are still; then he tilts his head at her. Jim had left the car locked, he is remembering, but she is not so young (four? five? how young had he been, when he felt his wrists ache with something older than himself?) that she might not already have been taught. 

“Shoo,” he says, and lets his mask fall from him like a dress from shoulders. He expects her to flee immediately—older children have—but instead she meets his eyes for a brief, blinding second. Both of them react to it, the dark nonspecific thing that yawns between them, her chin flying up and his lifting, infinitesimal; then she turns, and in turning she is gone, vanishing into the warren of streets.

Jim, in a thoughtful mood, drives home. 

 

—

 

Half a year later he stops in Dublin (he prefers Dublin, he avoids Belfast whenever possible; everyone who matters goes to Dublin, nobody goes North), before he gets down to the work of the next few years, not quite a holiday. (He leaves Sebastian in London. He always leaves Sebastian in London when he goes home or anywhere near it, and will continue to do so until it’s time to vanish in a rather more permanent fashion.) In Dublin he does not visit his sister but he does make sure she understands he is there; he expects she will move back North within the year, given the appropriate pressures, which he will make sure to apply. Ireland is his. She can take herself off to Belfast if she wants to stay on the island, and England or the Continent if she doesn’t; but there is room here for only a single Moriarty. (He knows that the rest of their family has changed their names, left the area, denied association; knows that Moira is the last holdout, more or less. There are second cousins Jim has never met. They do not matter. Until they move to Kilternan, after he falls, none of them matter. Except for his baby sister they don’t even cross his mind.) 

The first two days he spends  _ checking in, _ making sure that his folk remember his face and react appropriately, but the third he has all to himself. Jim goes to the National Gallery, examines their new Rembrandt with his hands linked behind his back in an appreciative, art-fancier stance, then wanders down to the park with a to-go cup of tea that he gets a fey young man to pay for with so little effort it hardly counts. 

And it’s in the park—on St. Stephen’s Green, watching the ducks and the families going past without ever noticing who and what is noticing them—that he sees her again. She’s sitting on a bench across from him, swinging her feet, and Jim  _ almost  _ does not notice her because she is sitting and eating a choc ice with the casual self-absorption of a child who is content and loved. Jim is forced to startled admiration, a twist inside his chest, serpentine, and when she feels his gaze on her one hand falls against her lap with a precision he cannot help but recognize. 

Again she meets his eyes. The little girl is too far away for him to be sure, but he thinks from the way she rolls her head on her neck that her pupils are blown as wide as his. 

Jim considers getting up, but a pack of tourists, loud and behatted (he is charmed by this, unutterably, and makes a note to buy the very  _ worst _ hat he can find, back in London) pass between them and she is, again, gone. 

 

—

 

In between playing gay, which Sebastian hates, and spending a little time with The Woman, which Sebastian likes, Jim goes for a week back to the old country, alone, to buy a house. He prowls little villages within a hour of Dublin (Ardclough, Ratoah, Kildalkey, even Bray), looking for somewhere in the country where the house will not be caught up against other houses, where Seb can have a little room to move and Jim can have the space to echo, to shudder, to write. He has decided he will be a writer. It seems like an easy kind of job, and one he can fill with himself like a cup with water. 

And in Bective, down the road from Kells which is as far North as he’s willing to go, he finds her down a sidestreet with her hair black and wild, her wrists ( _ his wrists) _ tense with discomfort as if they ache. Jim stops, struck by it, the feel of seeing her as sharp and sudden and intimate as James hitting the ground, and then takes a step forward. 

She’s not there. He would have been surprised if she were there. Jim, too, has vanished in his time. 

 

—

 

They’ve been in Kilternan for two weeks when Jim comes back from a jaunt he was never supposed to take to find her in his kitchen. By this time it’s not a surprise, it is an inevitability like water turning into wine, and neither is it a surprise that the range is on and the kettle boiling (he can still smell the matches, lit and then blown out), or that she looks totally at home. She’s still so terrifyingly small—Sebastian will have something to say about that—and her eyes (yes) are his, black with the thinnest ring of brown. 

He loves her, instantly; but then, he already did. She is  _ his,  _ and he understands, he  _ knows _ that they are one beast in two skins, daughter and—

“Mum,” the girl says into the silence between them. “You’re mum.”

Jim closes the door softly behind him, and faces her across the bright little room. 

“Jim Moriarty. Your mum. Yes. You’ll be a Moran with us, of course, after your daddy—but there’s no arguing with what’s in the blood. Come here, pet.”

She is in his arms before he can take a breath and she clings to him, the tense press of a child who does not touch, fingers firm in his collar; and he lifts his daughter up. 

“Tell me your name.”


	11. Chapter 11

In Belfast on business, wrapping up loose ends two months before he dies and moves with Seb to Kilternan, Jim smells smoke and hears screaming. He almost does not turn—he is no arsonist—but there is only one voice and the smell is matches, nothing larger. So he stops Biddy with a hand on her elbow, pivots on his heel.

The matches are in the gutter, a little boy is crying and a tow-headed girl looks scared beside him; a woman’s hand is wrapped around the upper arm of another girl, this one dark-haired and silent. 

“Shit,” says Biddy, flat, and points with her chin to the boy’s coat sleeve, still smoldering. 

“I see it,” Jim says, quietly, and then the dark girl turns her head, meets his eyes, and the little scene is transformed. He hisses in a breath, blinded, seeing James sprawled out at the foot of a tree, Moira crying, a trinity shattered back into three, insubstantial and unsanctified. The girl’s pupils are blown and she is silent as the grave, even as her mother screams; and Jim understands that he is seen, and known. 

But then, so is she. 

“Don’t even think it, boss,” drawls Biddy.

“Too late,” Jim says. Biddy has been his chief of staff in Belfast since he has  _ had _ a chief of staff in Belfast, and she is already gesturing with her free hand towards their tail, who straightens off the wall. “Have them followed. Intervene if necessary. And be sure to keep me  _ entirely _ informed.”

“You better make sure I have your new address.”

“Keep that quiet. Keep  _ all _ of that quiet. And this.” At last the little girl looks away and he is released; but between them is a covenant in blood. He will see her again, and soon. “Let’s go, Biddy darling. Things to do.”


	12. Chapter 12

“Jim, love,” Irene says in her best upper-class accent, on the phone one morning, “ She’ll be eight in February, so if you and your man have settled in, I think it’s just about time.”

“Eight? Are you  _ entirely _ certain?”

“A mother knows, Jim.” Irene pauses to allow him to roll his eyes. “Or I do, anyway.”

“Is this your little way of implying I’m behind in my duties, pet?”

“If I can remember when I sired her, you can certainly remember when you  _ birthed _ her.”

“You’d be surprised.” There is something cruel in Jim’s inflection, but she can also hear that he is smiling. His voice is never going to be deep, but it has a curious hoarse back-of-throat lilt that is appealing all on its own. “What did she do, Irene? It’s not like you to admit defeat.”

“I’m less admitting defeat than conceding I may not be the ideal weapon for the situation.” Irene’s own voice is light, carefully cultivated and phrased, and it has not given her away in years. “She set Kate on fire. Just a little, mind you, and she helped put her out as well. I’m sending you the A&E bill.” 

“Ah.”

“She has you written all over her, Jim. I may as well have contributed nothing, sweetheart, for all she takes after me.” Irene taps her lower lip with one manicured finger as Kate makes expansive gestures at her from where she’s sprawled out on the couch. “She’s as—nonspecific as you, and I worry about her—about Siobhan. I really do think it’s time.”

“Siobhan. Not Siobhán?”

Irene sighs. “I said I worried about her, didn’t I? She got terribly worked up, Jim, and it was easier to change how we said it. Speak to her teachers—all that. You know. But I never,  _ ever  _ want to see a child look like that again.”

‘Like what?”

“Like you in a state.”

She does not like the silence that follows her words. Irene knows, without knowing how she knows, that Jim is not an only child, that there are others, that the present tense may not be correct. 

“Jim.”

“Sebastian will be out of the house a week from Monday.” His voice is soft and low but intense in a way that sends shivers, not entirely unpleasant, all through her. “It is frankly  _ alarming  _ how pleased he is to have found a job entirely on his own. Can you make the trip on short notice?”

“Of course.”

“Don’t bother packing much, then. You’ll be turning right around, and we can provide for Siobhan.”

“I’ll expect first class, Jim darling. Both ways.”

He laughs, and Irene can see him as he was eight years ago in the half-light from the fire, lean and cruel and so very clear about what he wanted from her. Jim is, in his own dark nonspecific way, very beautiful, and she regrets nothing. She never does. 

 

—

 

Siobhan travels well, curled up against Irene’s hip and staring over her out the window at the Irish Sea, and in Dublin Jim is lounging against a borrowed car in his best suit. The lines of his binder are invisible, and his hips are narrow; there is a shadow of beard against his jaw. 

“You look well, James,” she says, and kisses him on the cheek. 

“Not as well as you, my dear,” he says, all politeness, but he has eyes only for the little girl; and Irene can feel the heavy intense weight of Siobhan’s focus shift abruptly. So she puts her down, then watches with a kind of wonder as Jim crouches, putting himself on eye level. 

“You’ll be Siobhan Moran with us,” he says, not at all like he is speaking to a child. “After your dad. But your mum’s a Moriarty, pet, and you’ve got that blood in you too.”

She blinks at him, slow. Irene braces herself; she knows what’s coming, the dissonance of Siobhan’s voice, the shock of it. 

“Ms. Adler said you transitioned,” Siobhan says, carefully. “After you had me. That you’re a man.”

“And who says a man can’t be a mother?” Irene can hear the echo of his boyhood accent, the same accent Siobhan has, picked up from god knows where. They are just the same, chameleon-like. The girl is silent for a moment, taking him seriously; then she tilts her head.

“Everyone.” She doesn’t sound confrontational or upset, like most children are when challenged; she sounds thoughtful. “Nearly everyone.”

“We aren’t those people, pet,” he says, and offers her his hands. “But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

Siobhan nods, and Irene feels a pang of something like guilt. She should not have waited this long. The relief on Siobhan’s face is achingly clear, and the desperation in her too-fast too-fluid move towards Jim is terribly obvious. She waits until he stands with his daughter in his arms, then hands him a folder. 

“From Caroline. It has yours too. She sends her love.”

“Liar.”

Irene flicks her fingers, dismissive. “She says to tell you she isn’t a pediatrician and won’t make house calls to another country, especially after that little stunt you pulled.”

Jim sighs, huge and theatrical. Siobhan’s fingers are tight in his collar, her dark eyes flickering between their faces as they talk. 

“Liar, again.”

“Jim.”

“Best we get going,” he says, almost gentle. “Your flight back leaves in ninety minutes. Plenty of time for you to have a nice little lunch on me.” His grins flashes, and he slides a handful of notes into her pocket as she leans in for a quick hug. They have known each other a very long time, after all. 

“Aren’t you sweet. Best to Seb.”

“And to Kate.”

He turns away. For a fraction of a second Siobhan’s eyes stay on Irene; they are each other’s blood and body, but she is not Irene’s daughter. Not really. Not anymore. 

Irene is reasonably sure she’s glad. 


	13. Chapter 13

When Jim visits Biddy Donahue for the first time since he died, it’s in a borrowed car on a day he’d been meant to stay at home. The look of surprise on her face when she opens the door is  _ deeply _ gratifying, as is the way it transforms into something else as she takes him in.

“Y’look good,” she says, after a long pause, “for a dead man.”

" _ Thank _ you, pet." Jim flashes her a grin. "Invite me in, will you? We’ve things to discuss." 

“We sure as shit do, since you’re upright and walking around instead of lying under some pretty stone somewhere. Guess that explains why no one’s heard Moran weeping and tearing his hair.” Biddy gestures him in and pulls the door shut behind her, glancing briefly down the empty street before she does. 

“Mhmm.” He pitches it singsong, and links his hands together behind his back as he examines the pictures hung along the wall. “He’s fat and happy down the coast a ways. Nice little safehouse.  _ Tell _ me these aren’t your children.”

“They are, for my sins.” She comes up behind him at a careful distance. “The oldest one’s nine—that’s Cathleen. The boy’s Padraig. And  _ that  _ one’s Siobhán.”

Jim lifts his eyebrows. He has not gotten where he is without reading intonations and posture, without being able to see through people even when they are trying to hide it. "And where are the little angels?" 

“They’re at school _ ,  _ M, it’s the middle of the day. They won’t bother you. Now how the bleeding hell are you above the ground?”

 

—

 

He’s still there, several hours later, on his third cup of tea with files spread out over the kitchen table (there are tasks which will, given a few years and certain events, need to be fulfilled), when the front door bangs open and the house gets abruptly  _ much _ louder. Biddy stiffens.

“Relax,” Jim murmurs, distracted. Over the course of the afternoon he has slipped, slowly, into his childhood accent, quick and careless. “But honestly, Biddy,  _ three?” _

(There had been three of them, too; Jimmy and James and Moira, elder brothers and baby sister, a Moriarty trinity in the Catholic countryside of Northern Ireland. It echoes in the back of his throat as he says it, thick enough to taste.)

“I had them before I started working for you.” Her voice is almost pert. “You’re a bit of a second career for me, Jim.”

He makes an inarticulate amused sound at her, willing to play along; they’ve been at work some time, and Biddy is a competent and talented, if not brilliant, employee. Enough of the professional web Jim has spent the past five years constructing is torn to shreds to give a good impression that he himself has been ripped out of it, but not all, and he has faith that she will not send ripples along what remains. 

“They’ll be through here for a snack in a minute,” she adds. “Just so’s you’re warned.”

“I think I can manage. You’re not  _ married, _ are you?”

“No. Not for years now.” She puts her palms against the counter and leans on them, a raw-boned woman in early middle age. “But you pay well enough to make up for—”

The door knocks back against the wall and she straightens. The older two children are almost carbon copies of Biddy herself, freckled and auburn-haired and rangy, but with dark brown eyes instead of gray, and he can see right away that they’ll be slighter than she is when they’re grown; but the third is another beast entirely. Rather than slight she is  _ thin,  _ so thin he frowns. Sebastian would be appalled; Jim is not even surprised. Biddy is not the kind of parent who would deny food to a child, but there are other explanations that make a good deal more sense, even in a child this young. He wonders if Biddy has worked it out yet, and what she will do when she does. 

And then she turns her head and looks at him. The other two had both glanced once and then moved on, so their mother—whose day job is almost certainly from home, given that she was here for him to interrupt—must have visitors or clients often. But the dark-haired youngest daughter (Jim had been the oldest, but otherwise—) looks at him and does not stop looking, and while her eyes too are a very dark brown, the brown is a thin ring around blown pupils, so wide they drink the light. 

“Siobhán,” Biddy says like a warning. 

And Siobhán flinches. Jim watches her drop her chin down and a little to the left, and with a shock like his brother hitting the ground he recognizes anger. His  _ own  _ anger, but cold. And when her wrists curve in discomfort as if they ache, they are his own wrists in boyhood. 

He looks at Biddy. If there had been even the barest hint of violence in Biddy’s face, he thinks through a haze of shock and recognition, he might have killed her then and there. But there is just bafflement, worry, tension; she is, if anything, a little afraid. 

“Ma,” says the other girl, through a biscuit, “ _ ma,  _ Siobhán brought matches to school, I saw her, she had them.”

“She’s always got ’em,” says the boy, and the look Siobhán gives him is all that cold scornful anger, and Jim understand with a kind of backward-remembering suddenness that there will be, very shortly, tragedy. Possibly more than one. 

Biddy holds out her hand, wordless and weary, and the little girl (her hair is almost black, and tightly braided or it would be tangled around her small pale face) hands the box over. For whatever obscure reason of her own her eyes flick to Jim again, consumed with some emotion dark and nonspecific and so familiar it makes him twitch. 

And because Biddy is focused on her youngest, and because the other two children are already gone, he drops whatever humanity he has and meets her gaze, letting her see him as she herself is seen. 

Her chin lifts. There is, suddenly and briefly, something horrible in her face, a pent-up trembling relief that strikes Jim like a wave; and then she looks away. In looking away she turns, and in turning she is gone, and Biddy blows out a breath. 

“Sorry. She’s enough to make a man believe in changelings, that one. Anyway, the East Wind files—”

He holds up a hand, delicate and half-feminine. Biddy waits like she knows what’s coming. 

“And how many children did you say you had?” he asks, smooth. 

Biddy licks her lips. There is in her face some strange admixture of anger and, yes, relief as strong as Siobhán’s.

“Two,” she says at last, and looks up at him. “A boy and a girl.”

Jim, tapping his fingers against the table, smiles. “There now,” he says brightly, “that’s the spirit.” Then: “And her name?”

“So you saw that.”

“What don’t I?”

“I’ve been trying to break her of it, it makes me look a right fool, she—”

“Is no longer your problem, Biddy Donahue, and if I were you I’d give out she’s died. I doubt you’ll have much pushback, and I’ll arrange the particulars once I’m home. Her name?”

Her mouth twitches up at the corner, even as her lips stay thin and pressed together. “I’ve no doubt she’ll tell you herself, M.” Her head comes up, and he sees the girl in her for a brief blinding second. “After all,” she adds, “it’s not my place, is it? I’m not her mum.”

“No,” Jim says, and grins like a fox or like a wolf. “I am.”


	14. Chapter 14

Six days after Sebastian finds a job, his professional web shivers; only once, but it shivers hard. The email is blank, no subject, no body text; but attached to it is a copy of a CAMHS referral form for a girl of seven, surname B—, first initial S., written at four thirty-two on a Wednesday afternoon and recommending priority assessment at Beechcroft. There is a handwritten note at the bottom, which reads  _ M: In-patient suggested. Intake visit in AM. Pressing reasons. See next. _

Jim flips to the email that had arrived as he read the first. Surname B—, first initial P., intake form for a boy of eight with significant third-degree burns. The note here, in the same hand, reads:  _ Matches _ . 

Ideally, of course, Jim thinks as he notes down the hospital address, he would leave now. Tonight. But there is Sebastian to consider, humming to himself in the kitchen as he makes tea, blissfully unaware; and this is not a situation in which blunt force will be useful. Which means he will have to go alone, which means he will have to  _ wait,  _ which means he will be dealing with the NHS, which is really no one’s favorite way to spend a day. He taps his fingers. Beechcroft is in Belfast. Belfast is less than two hours away. He can be there and back without Sebastian knowing, if he times it right, if he waits for the first day of work. It will give him time. Jim knows he will need the time, but his body drags at him; eight days inside will be eight days too many for her, but there is no other choice that guarantees success. Not with limited resources. 

The emails sit. After a moment, Jim plucks his mobile from the desk and frowns at the handwriting, sorting through an internal categorization systems that returns to him within seconds the working name of the woman it belongs to (Biddy Donahue, forty-three), and a number at which she can be reached. 

He taps out a contract, a contact, a respectable sum, and waits; in a few seconds her response appears on the screen, lasts long enough to be read, fades. Jim makes a soft, satisfied noise. It will not be simple, like plucking the little girl from a hospital would be simple; there are rules on a locked ward that even Jim cannot charm his way past. He already knows this. But there are other ways and means, other doors that can be opened, that must be opened. Times may be different now but not so very different, not for the kinds of beast he is—third degree burns indeed. He brushes thin pale fingers over the scar on his upper lip. There had been three of them, too. Jimmy and James and Moira. 

He wonders, idly, what drove her to it. 

 

—

 

On the day Sebastian goes whistling off to work he borrows the O’Doyle’s car. There is a small girl here too, strawberry blond, too young to go to school, peering at him from the top of the stairs as her parents make noises of how nice it is to see him again, how are they settling in, how is the old Connor house and how is his husband? Are they liking Kilternan? And twenty minutes later he has the keys and they have a hundred quid and everyone is happy and he is on the way to Belfast, cheerful as a butcherbird on a barbed-wire fence. It’s a nice drive. He has an Irish passport now, not that there’s anyone at the border to stop him, but it’s in his breast pocket and Jim likes the photograph and would appreciate the chance to show it to a border guard, preferably a young and handsome border guard. But he does not even have to slow down.  

Beechcroft is a low-slung white building. It looks very clean. Very modern. Very nonthreatening. He sits in the car in the visitor lot for perhaps twenty minutes, looking over Caroline’s notes—Caroline, who he has not seen since he left London and does not necessarily plan to see again, but who when he called her practice three days past had not even questioned why he would need to walk into, and then out of, a children’s psychiatric facility—and humming, off-key, before he creases his documentation neatly, taps it against the steering wheel, and swings his feet to the pavement. He does not expect to need the birth certificate any more than he needed the passport; but it never hurts to be sure. 

The clock shows five past one. At quarter past one there will never have been a  _ surname B—, first initial S.  _ There will only be  _ Surname M—,  _ and she will have a record as perfectly clean and shining as his own or as Sebastian’s. 

When he walks in the woman at the front desk does not look up. The orderly leaning against the wall near the door into the rest of the facility straightens, turns around, shoulders the door open. Jim slips through it behind her, follows at a little distance. He is wearing slacks and a sweater that does not fit quite right, and comfortable shoes, carrying his coat and a briefcase; he looks like every therapist he has ever met, mild and thoughtful behind the eyes, walking purposeful but gently. Nobody looks at him twice, much less once. 

The orderly stops for the space of a breath outside of a room, then goes on. Jim stops for rather longer. The keypad gives him no trouble; he does not look through the small wire-reinforced window but he knows that he is seen. Seen but not yet known. 

When he turns around, as he does with great care after closing the door,  Siobhán is standing in the corner with her back against the wall. Her hands are tucked behind her. Her hair is tangled and very dark, and so are her eyes, and either they are black or her pupils are blown, and she is beautiful. As he watches her she tilts her head, just a little, and drops her lower jaw to pant; and he knows that tilt. Knows it intimately. 

Jim checks his watch, then sets the briefcase down and lets the mild-eyed therapist slip from him like a dress from shoulders. 

“We have about six minutes, pet,” he says. “I had to guess at your size.”

He has to wait a full ninety seconds before she moves, and it takes his breath away when she does; he can  _ feel _ his childhood rise up to choke him. Elder brothers and baby sister, a Moriarty trinity in the Catholic countryside of Northern Ireland and he wonders again what the little girl’s justification had been, what cold streak of trembling, incandescent,  _ brilliant  _ rage had guided her, giving her direction. Whatever it is he can see it just under her skin as she moves forward like a flicker of heat lightning in the distance, scrabbling with small fingers at the clasp, breath ragged. 

It takes a minute but Jim masters himself. Lets the past flow through him and away. 

“Tell me your name,” he says, as she pulls a dress and shoes from the briefcase. She looks up at him. 

There is a small silence. Then: three syllables like dropped pins. “Siobhan.”

“Good girl.” Jim turns his back, blocking with his body the window, and says, quietly, “Do you know me?”

Fabric rustles. 

“Yes.”

There is something in her voice, some pent-up and horrible thing; the answer has the relief of years behind it. Jim fishes in the pocket of his coat, and holds something out to her behind his back. Small cool fingers take it from his. 

“I had to use an old photograph,” he says, and turns to see her in her too-big dress opening the worn passport. Again her eyes find his, and Jim is surer than he has ever been about anything when he sees the peculiar careful blankness of her face. “We’ll get you a new one when that expires next year.”

“Moran?”

“Your daddy, pet. Sebastian. We all use his name for now.” He goes to one knee, closing up the briefcase and handing her the coat that had been lying under his across his arm. “But your mum’s a Moriarty, Siobhan, and so are you.”

“My mum.”

“Me.” Jim flashes her a smile, savage and swift, and a kind of tension goes out of the little girl who has his dark brown eyes and the shape of his wrists in boyhood. “Best we get going.”

He offers her a hand. She takes it. 


	15. Chapter 15

They never talk about it, but Jim knows Sebastian has had a child within thirty seconds of stripping Seb out of his clothes. It’s not hard to tell. It must have been before the tiger; the livid scars running diagonal across his chest are newer than the faint silver striping on his belly and hips—too new to be marks of an adolescent’s shifting body shape. Sebastian clears his throat when he sees Jim looking, and Jim raises his eyes, grins a slow fierce smile, and refocuses. 

It takes almost as little time to find the daughter. Sebastian’s given name is an open secret between them, after all, and official records exist. It’s none of Jim’s business why Seb had her at all but he’s just as pleased; in his line of work he will need an apprentice someday, and he suspects Moran’s taste in men has not altered much in the past four years. The little girl seems fine where she is so he leaves her there; what would either of them do with a toddler, when business is booming? 

Five years later they move to Kilternan. And until they move to Kilternan, none of this matters; she is an idea, half a fiction, a theoretical; and then she is a call in the middle of the night. Seb never even stirs when he takes it, and Jim listens for a long time in silence, on his back in their bed, then sighs. 

“Fascinating,” he says, soft. “Expect me midafternoon on Monday. Where are you? Can you get them both to—yes. Liverpool’s perfect. Have a passport ready, will you? I haven’t the time. Pay whatever it takes.”

He listens for a few seconds. 

“Last name Moran. Let her pick the first if she doesn’t want to—okay. Thanks, Biddy, and sure but you won’t find us ungrateful.”

And that’s that. Five days later, when Sebastian takes himself humming off to work, Jim goes down the lane to the house of seven children (a little girl too young for school watches him from the top of the stairs, and he makes a mental note to see if any of the half-dozen girlchildren are the right age; their daughter will need friends) where after a little cheerful bargaining and a hundred pounds he has the use of their car for the day. In Dublin it is the simplest thing in the world to get on a plane, breezing through customs like he is not the most wanted man in Britain—the flight is barely long enough for a cup of tea. Once on the ground he makes his way via cab to a little waterfront rental with a lovely view of the docks and the sea beyond, and feels good about how much he pays his employees. 

Caroline opens the door to him nearly at once, looking harassed and harrowed but pleased. “Come on in, then,” she says. “I’m just having her pack up.” As he shuts the door behind him, Caroline hands him a folder and an  Éire passport. “Biddy said to make sure you got these,” she adds. Her voice is brusque and disapproving; Jim smiles at her as innocent as a maid. She produces another, thicker pac ket. “And I pulled  _ these _ for you. Violating a number of patient confidentiality laws and risking my job in the process, so say thank you, C aro.”

“Thank you, Caro,” Jim sing-songs, obedient, and glances through the file; medical records, all the way back to the ones with her birth parents’ names on them. “How is she?”

"She’s fine. Nothing a different family situation won’t fix." She’s back to professionalism again, though she's still all but bristling at him. “Apparently she’s been bounced to just about every aunt and uncle. Most of them managed not to hit her.” Caroline’s face is closed like a door. “Biddy tells me not one of them questioned him showing up claiming to be the father. Just gave her away.”

At Jim’s questioning look Caroline spread her hands. “Jimmy, she came in with bruises. I thought it was past time.”

“Bruises.” His voice has gone dangerous.

“It wasn’t even her I was seeing.” She watches him closely, eyes on his pulse point. “The son of the family she was with came in with burns. Minor ones, but—I wanted to prevent a tragedy. Two tragedies. So I called Biddy.”

“There’s a good lass.” He tucks his rage away, neatly. “I imagine they’ll give out that she died. I would.”

Caroline starts to answer but is stopped by the appearance of a little girl, all huge dark eyes and black hair; and Jim is struck by her, and by his own childhood risen up to choke him off (there had been three of them, for a little while, Jimmy and James and Moira, a Moriarty trinity in the Catholic countryside of Northern Ireland, and he sees the way he broke wild in the curve of the little girl’s neck; there can at the end of things only be one). 

“Siobhán—sorry, love, Siobhan,” Caroline says, breaking the name down into three syllables the second time, which is fascinating and must mean she’s caught hell from Biddy, a man as Irish as they're made. “This is—”

“Your mum,” Jim puts in, on some instinct he does not fully parse. “If it suits you, pet.”

She looks up at him with pupils blown and wrists—his wrists, intimately familiar—trembling. She’s small; she must take after her other parent, and Jim realizes with a nasty pleasure that Sebastian has a type; and her hair is a tangle. 

And then she nods. Jim does not at the heart of him understand love, does not think of himself as loving Sebastian or indeed anyone; but he understands need. He understands hunger, and the desperate longing towards something for which there is no name. 

So he holds out his hands. 

In another instant he is swinging his daughter up into his arms and Caroline is looking at him with the oddest expression. 

“Peas in a pod, Jimmy,” she says at last, and sees him to the waiting cab without another word. In the morning she will go home too, to London; it will take her, Caroline thinks as she closes the door, the rest of her life to understand what happened here. 


	16. Chapter 16

The room they meet in is pleasantly generic, a picture of a sailboat above the bed, and Moira has brought one of her other children, a small, dark-haired girl—Moira in miniature—who sits quietly in an arm chair, absorbed in holding both sides of a conversation with her doll.

“Thank you for coming,” Moira says, tone matched to the room, and Jim smiles.

“Anything for my baby sister.”

There’s a flicker of distaste on her face, there and then gone, and he settles himself back against the wall. 

“Shall we get to business, then? I’m sure you haven’t called me here simply for a bit of family reunion.” He knows why she has called, of course, knows every detail on the hospital records and a few that aren’t, has read the police report, has listened to the 999 call. 

“I have three children,” Moira says, words thrown, a challenge. 

“How traditional. It must be in our genes, then.” There had been three of them, Jimmy and James and Moira, a Moriarty trinity in the Catholic countryside of his boyhood, and he knows by the flash of her eyes she remembers it as well.

“There are only two of us,” she says, and the  _ now _ is so close to her lips, brimming over, that he wants to lick it off. He does not, and the syllable stays there, shining with grease and savor. “But—some things do run in the family, Jimmy.”

“Jim,” he corrects absently. “True. I like to think we share a certain sensibility. You always did think of the cleverest games.”

“I don’t do that now,” she says tightly. “I have children.” They had been children then, of course, but Jim doesn’t bother to point that out. “And we’re not talking about me.”

“Ah,” Jim breathes. “One of your poppets living up to our name, then?”

She glances at the girl, and Jim sees again what he already noticed—the casual self-absorption of a child who is contented and loved. Not the oldest child, clearly, skin showing pale and unmarked at her throat and arms, and not the youngest, either, or he’d have recognized her, and she him. Middle child, then.

Moira stops looking at the girl and looks at him. She doesn’t send the child out of the room—which means the girl must be dull enough to either not notice what has happened or to not care. What a disappointment she must be to clever Moira. This was the problem with reproduction, of course, the hopeless scramble  of traits and inelegant sop of simply hoping for the best.

“She isn’t getting what she needs,” Moira says, soft, and if Jim knows his baby sister at all he knows how hard it is for her to admit it. “And I can’t give it to her.” 

_ Not and have an intact family at the end of it _ , Jim silently adds. He watches her, silent. She never could wait him out, and he wants to hear her say it.

“I want you to take her.” There is no apology in her tone, no pleading. “Raise her.”

He opens his mouth and she snaps, “Don’t you argue with me, Jimmy. You wouldn’t have come if you weren’t going to agree to it. Take her. Raise her as a Moriarty.”

If she isn’t going to ascribe to the polite fiction that her call was a surprise and the visit a mystery, then he certainly doesn’t have to.

“This seems like a terribly large reaction to a bit of youthful high spirits, Moira. It was practically an accident, after all. Wouldn’t you be better off with some sort of,” he wiggles his fingers about his head, “counseling? Perhaps for the older as well. It clears up all sorts of problems, I’ve heard.”

“There’s nothing to fix in a Moriarty, Jimmy.”

“That isn’t what you thought last time we spoke.”

She looks away. “That was a long time ago.” More than a decade, perhaps even more than two. Moriartys scatter upon reaching adulthood, like beasts unwilling to compete for the same resources, he thinks, and giggles. “I wasn’t a mother then,” Moira says. “But I have three children. And if I’m going to have two, I’ll damn well be sure the third one isn’t—” Between them like smoke hangs the sharp scent of sap, the thud of a body. The wet organic sound of bones moving in ways they were not meant to. 

Jim smiles. Well. He bares his teeth.

“I might consider it. You would owe me, of course.”

“I would never see you again,” she says. “Or her. Clean  _ break _ , Jimmy.” There is the barest flash of amusement in her eyes, just enough for him to see and know that she is still his baby sister. The best punchline is still one that ends in blood. “I won’t have this hanging over us. Or her. You’ll take her, and she’ll be yours. And your man’s, I suppose.”

“What’s this about a man?” he says, face a mask of surprise, and just like when they were children, she is so  _ easy _ to irritate, to bring to anger, like running a stele along a well-used knife, edge aligning. He relents. No sense in chipping a good blade, after all, and he is quite sure after all these years that she  _ would _ break, if he wanted it. She is out of practice. Dull. He is not. 

“I suppose I’ll offer a home to the poor wayward thing, then. You brought the papers?” She pulls them out of her purse. “It will have to be today, I don’t have the car for long. I suppose she’s at home? I hope you locked the door, I don’t have time for you to track her down.”

She smiles, and suddenly, delightfully, he is  _ wrong _ . It’s so rare that he takes a moment to taste it, letting his mind flick through the wonderful disasters that could occur every moment, future shattering into a thousand thousand paths of blood and betrayal and she has not gone dull at all. There is a thing here he does not know. She has kept a secret from him.

The pleasure is so heady it is almost physical, and he rolls his head on his neck and whispers, “Tell me.”

“Siobhan,” she says, softly, each syllable an incorrect lilt,  _ see-oh-bahn _ , “That’s enough. You can stop.”

Jim has not forgotten the child in the chair—Jim has not forgotten anything, not for years (February eighteenth nineteen eighty five: the bite of wind while he eats greasy chips and the shape of a water stain on the ceiling above him, July twenty second  nineteen ninety two and the curl of a woman’s hair as she sat down across from him on the tube, March eleventh two thousand and one a bird lifting a crumb in its beak while he sat on a bench in the park, fragment after fragment, his entire life a listing of details and moments with no context or narrative. Endless cells in a database with no order and no identity. He bites his tongue until he tastes blood, and) he refocuses. There is always blood. Even when there is nothing else.

_ Siobhan _ , his sister says, and the girl in the chair dies. Or is born. He will decide later. The girl who sits there now is  _ his _ , body and bone and blessed blood, down to the fall of hair over her ears and the tension in her wrists, and he falls in love, fairy tale love, mad, wonderful love, his life suddenly making sense. This is why he built his empire, why he did not, at the end, burn it down while clever clever clever clever fingers plucked and pulled music out of metal and pulp. He will give it to her, this brilliant, incandescent girl. She will be all the best of him—she already  _ is _ , he can see it in the tilt of her head and the precise way her hands move from cradling the doll to falling against in her lap.

Moira has not spoken, but she does now. “I taught her. For school, and—when we’re out. No one knows. She’s good at it.” There’s a bit of pride in her voice for the skill, and Jim feels his gorge rise.

“Never again,” he says softly. It is sacrilege, obscene, like watching someone pour poster paints over a Rembrandt. 

Moira makes a resigned sound but doesn’t argue. She’s his daughter, after all. The girl—Siobhan—is still waiting, perfectly still, and she glows for him, the snake and the apple wrapped into a consummate package. He falls to his knees and holds his arms out to her, and she is in them, the tense press of a child who does not touch easily or often but she holds to him. Moira says something, perhaps, or she may not bother; he is not listening. She leaves the papers on the bed and shuts the door behind her, and they are alone, him and his daughter, a perfect Mendelian unit. 

But, he allows, gracious, he can already see something of Sebastian in her—the brow, the round of a shoulder. She certainly didn’t get those squared knees from him; that is all Sebastian.

Jim never forgets. His brain is a perfect hard drive, brutal and absolute, and as he drives her home to Kilternan, he—rewrites it. And he tells her who she is as he does it, that Seb is her dad—not  _ now _ , not  _ beginning _ , but  _ is— _ and he is her mum, and they love her very much. A Moriarty trio in the Irish countryside, he thinks, and laughs out loud. She smiles when he does it, a small, secret thing cradled between her throat and her spine, and it sings to him.

She will be magnificent. 

 


	17. Chapter 17

…there is nothing for her and the nothing tastes of smoke.

And then—much later—there is mum. 

**Author's Note:**

> While sixteen of these were written with the usual heavy input and influence from Blue, the coauthor on this series, the second to last chapter is entirely his.
> 
> Caroline Bramwell, the doctor who shows up a number of times in this fic, belongs to Pasiphile, comes from [Genesis](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5416937), and is used with their permission.
> 
> The title and quote in the summary come from Phillip Larkin's "Poetry of Departure".


End file.
